Annual Planning
Annual planning in an agile context is the process of defining strategic goals and initiatives for the coming year, aligning them with the product's overall vision and objectives. It involves collaboration among various stakeholders to identify key priorities, allocate resources, and establish a roadmap that guides the Stream teams throughout the year.
Goal
The outcome of annual planning is that teams ensure delivery towards the strategic goals of the product and avoid solely focussing on incremental optimisations.
Context
In ZeroBlockers, Stream Teams are expected to iterate on solutions until they deliver the desired outcomes. But there is a risk that teams continue to optimise existing features at the expense of other potential solutions and strategic initiatives. Annual planning is a way to ensure that the teams take the time to view the big picture of the product and ensure that their efforts are aligned and are not just focussing on incremental optimisations.
Inputs
| Artifact | Description |
|---|---|
| Product Vision | A high-level and inspirational description of where the product will be in 5 - 10 years. |
| Product Strategy | A high-level plan for achieving the product vision within the next 1-3 years. |
| Market Insights | Insights from the analysis of the market and the competitive landscape. |
| Customer Insights | Insights from user research, customer feedback, and support tickets. |
| Product Performance Data | Data on the performance of the product, including usage, engagement, and customer satisfaction. |
Outputs
| Artifact | Description | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| DIBBs (Data, Insights, Beliefs, Bets) | A decision-making framework that starts with data collection, moves to deriving insights, forms beliefs (hypotheses), and makes bets (actionable experiments) based on those beliefs. |
|
Rationale
The DIBBs process forces people to acknowledge that all of the big ideas we have are bets - we don't know exactly what customers want. Our core aim becomes reducing the odds of our bets being unsuccessful.
By starting with data we ensure that we are investing on more than just hunches or whiteboard strategies. By defining our hypothesis we have testable statements that we can use to iteratively validate our bets.
The beauty of this process is that it is the same way that teams analyse the features that they are implementing. This difference here is that we are thinking much bigger and working with far less data.
Other Artifact Formats
| Format | Description | ZeroBlockers Opinion |
|---|---|---|
| Narrative Plans | Detailed written documents that describe the strategic goals, initiatives, and the rationale behind them. | The lack of structure can leads to gaps in logic and understanding. On top of this, the documents are often not read by all stakeholders. |
| Roadmaps | Visual representation of the strategic plan and timelines. | Having a roadmap can lead to premature locking in of scope and dates. This limits the autonomy of teams and the solutions they can deliver. |
| OKRs | Objectives and Key Results to set and measure goals. | OKRs require data and insights to create effective objectives and key results. ZeroBlockers uses OKRs when setting objectives but we believe that it is better to explicitly define the data and insights at the higher level annual planning process. |
| Portfolio Kanban | Tracking progress of strategic initiatives as a portfolio. | Portfolios lead to an output thinking as it captures all the work being done rather than the outcomes that we are trying to achieve. |
Anti-patterns
- Overcommitment: Setting unrealistic goals that overwhelm teams and dilute focus.
- Silos: Failing to involve key stakeholders, leading to misalignment and gaps.
- Inflexibility: Sticking rigidly to the plan without adapting to changes or new information.
- Lack of Measurement: Not establishing clear metrics or failing to measure progress against goals.